New mirror poses and a tutorial for Second Life reflection

My friend Mali told me I can make something for the upcoming pose fair and put it in her shop 😉 I was all yaay and stuff lol, and when I was making photos for the Visionaire graduation exam one of them was a mirror photo that I posted on my Facebook and few people have asked how to do this so I am going to write about it.

First thing I do is look for real life photos that show the mirror reflection so I can figure out the angles. For this one I chosed the simplest possible pose – from the back and the mirror shot is from the front. So simply pose your avatar in front of the mirror and position your camera the way you want it. Use Alt+left mouse button, click on your avatar, chose the angle and take your snapshot, please make sure to save it as .png type of the file. Then you right click on the mirror, go in edit mode and change the transparency of the mirror, I made mine to be 95% transparent – this way I can still see the mirror but also I can see through it. Play with it and see what fits you best. When you’re done, close the edit window and go to the SL camera controls – open the little camera control window and simply click on the arrow that rotates the camera around your avatar – here you have to think is the mirror totally vertical or is it rotated because this will determine the reflection and the angle of your second shot. Mine was horizontal so I changed only the rotation. So rotate all around your avi until you have her standing right in front of the camera, like the reflection is supposed to look like. I made the mirror transparent because the camera will go behind the mirror. Take another snapshot and save it on your pc. Thats it for the shots! In the attached photo you can see my 2 shots, one from the back and other from the front.

Now we go in PS, open your first snapshot (one from the back) and add another one (mirrored) in the same document. Then select the avatar from the first snapshot and paste it on a new layer, put this layer above the 2nd snapshot. Then make sure you click on the 2nd snapshot and mask it out – you will have to hide everything besides the mirror itself – only the part of the mirror that you would see as a reflection. Here you can play a bit with the opacity, maybe it looks better if its a bit transparent.

In my photo you can see my avi cut out on the left side and the reflection masked out on the right side. I usually add a grey layer just so I can see are there any spots that I made messy. I hide or delete that layer when I’m done.

Thats it, now merge all visible layers and see maybe you wanna play with the adjustments like color balance, exposure, contrast etc. I also add a bit of noise if the mood fits. Of course you can edit the avatar so it looks better, I left mine all messy because I was a bit lazy and in a hurry lol

Last photo shows the layers, just in case anyone got confused with what goes where lol

So far I made 16 poses and if I get time will do all photos with the reflection, the mirror prop will be on the pose fair in the PoseME poses shop 😉